De Gier Surfer - Crowdsourced Strat

De Gier Guitars unveil the Surfer guitar, a crowdsourced strat combining the suggestions of guitarists and De Gier's construction ideas.

Thicker and Recessed Headstock

The Surfer is De Gier's "Ultimate Strat", maintaining traditional looks while incorporating the most requested specs and features.

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The Surfer comes with an alder body cut in the traditional double cutaway shape. De Gier gives you the option to get a swamp ash body with an additional price. At first glance, the body may seem like a straightforward Strat copy, but careful examination will reveal that it has what De Gier calls 'enhanced curves' for playing comfort and a slightly adjusted cutaway that allows for improved higher note access.

Sunburst Model

The neck of the Surfer is made of maple while the default fingerboard is made of rosewood. You can opt for a coated maple fretboard if that is your preference. The Surfer has 22 medium Jescar frets that are unique because it has hidden fret ends which provides smoother playability. The neck is also slightly wider at the edges for easy access to the top and bottom E strings. For improved neck stability, De Gier increased the thickness of the neck-heel joint to give the screws more room to grip.

We recently wrote about some scientific research which suggests that wood and body shape does not affect the guitar's tonality. De Gier Guitars seems to go against this saying that based on their experience with bass guitars, a thicker headstock provides better sustain, stronger fundamental note and clearer harmonics. Going by this experience, the Surfer strat comes with a thicker headstock that is recessed to provide better string angle without the need to use string tees.

For the pickups, you can pick between any of the popular "boutique" pickups from Nordstrand, Lollar, Klein and Fralin. You can also request for other pickups if you want to customize your Surfer guitar. The pickups are controlled by a traditional 5-way pickup selector, along with a master volume knob, a master tone knob and a bridge pickup tone knob. Other hardware components include a Graphtech Tusq nut, a Gotoh 510T-FE1 tremolo bridge and Gotoh SDS-510 HAPM tuners.

The Surfer comes in all traditional solid colors, you can also pick special finishes like sunburst, relic and metallic colors via the customization options. Left handed players can also have their own Surfer for an added fee.

Crowdsourcing is a great idea, specially when they ask the right crowd (working musicians and experts), and get the designs properly implemented.

The De Gier Surfer is currently priced at €1,895. For more details, you can visit De Gier Guitars Online.